Licon's Argument To The Existence Of God And Evil

Licon states that free-will is not an argument to the existence of God and evil. He introduces his thesis by naming all kinds of suffering-inducing situations and circumstances such as, famine, disease, rape, murder, earthquakes etc. and that if there is an all-powerful, all-knowing God who is perfectly benevolent (1) he would want to prevent all this suffering, but not all of these situations are human caused, Licon fails to comment on earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, the so called natural disasters even in those, God doesn’t interfere, He merely allows that to happen as well. He concludes that “freedom is intrinsically valuable” and it is valuable but it is also absolute, not partial. “ It suggests that our ability to make our own free decisions is so important that it is a good outweighing even all the bad things people choose to do- it

The fact of the matter is yes, we can imagine such a device but yet, we do not have it. Why would God have it? We humans do a lot of things that are not completely ethical particularly when a lot of people is involved in the situation and yet end up choosing the most moral under the circumstances but not necessarily the most ethical because that is how we have agreed to live our lives. Licon says “The freewill defense cannot explain why God didn’t take such basic preemptive measures” referring to the device and the freewill defense does explain it, just as it explains why such device is nonexistent. His conclusions lack good support: “Freewill defense places too much weight on freedom, and not enough weight on the lives and wellbeing of innocents” (4) Wrong, freedom is and it is absolute. “The freewill defense simply gets the moral facts wrong” (4). Again, freewill is just there, it exists and it is not supposed to get anything right or